Gingerbread UI Improvements Won
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A chief complaint issued by many opponents to Android is what some might call a bland and uninspired user interface. While many (myself included) would live and die by the stock UI, Google has made it clear that they plan to revamp the existing look and feel of Android to make it a bit more friendly to the end user while maintaining all the killer features that have come to make the OS a huge success. In the mean time almost all of the big Android manufacturer’s have taken it upon themselves to develop their own UI skins for their devices. And while huge strides have been made in those custom interfaces, one hope of an improved stock implementation would be to eliminate the need for them, creating faster device update schedules as an effect.
But at least in the case of HTC Sense, one of the more popular UI customizations, the changes in Gingerbread won’t mean the end of the interface found on such devices as the EVO 4G and Droid Incredible, at least according to design team lead Drew Bamford. In a discussion with Forbes he had the following to say:
People will have to vote with their wallets. If Gingerbread is good, then Sense will appeal less to people, and they would then rather have faster OS update instead.
The cliche fact of the matter is that the average consumer won’t know or care about any of this. They will go out and buy the Incredible 2 and the EVO 2 and won’t know that they won’t be seeing quick updates to Android due to Sense.
But the more knowledgeable folks will take a look at Gingerbread and if they feel it’s flashy enough for them, they will only go for phones with stock Android.
I was disappointed when i found out that i couldn’t turn off” motoblur” on my droid x.! Seriously the ugliest bloat i haveever seen! HTCs sense is nice and very functional. I sideloaded launcher pro plus, now my DX is sexy! Stock is great! It would be awesome if HTC would put sense on the market. Id pay ten or fifteen dollars to own the UI that was on my evo and be able to turn it off whenever i wanted.
I don’t understand why these custom UIs can’t just be pre-installed home replacer apps like Launcher Pro that you can enable or disable as you please. It seems like that sort of development would make updating faster and easier anyways.
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I’m with Bigmerf, Vanilla works fine for me. My only complaint about it is a small one, I would prefer a black notification bar instead of the white one.
Other than that, are they serious about it being bland? The iPhone is bland on every level and I don’t hear complaints about it, other than from die hard Android users ribbing Apple.
M Incredible doesn’t look like that one….
I think when the stock version is out they should just right away release a vanilla 2.x or 3.x or whereever its at for the phone and then once they have sense tied into it all, release that. and if they want to make sure all their phones are the same then push the update out and make it mandatory for the phone to be able to connect to a network or something how with the PS3 if you arent gonna run the newest version of the OS, then you arent gonna get on the playstation network…
Someone has to be out there with new ideas. What’s the point of an open source OS if there’s no innovation? HTC should innovate Sense because it is their passion but it shouldn’t be necessary for *every* OEM to come with a custom UI.
Just get rid of the customized UI’s. Offer them as options but don’t leave us with no options!
i really never want a phone that has anything other than vanilla android. its one of the reasons i went nexus
The most key thing the Android UI needs to bring it up to par is GPU acceleration. Once the UI and scrolling becomes smoother and hardware accelerated then the iphone wont have anything on Android.
I like Sense and love the Vanilla UI. All I want is options, let me take disable Sense if I want. I mean REALLY disable it, not hide it so I end up with 2 heavy processes running.